Responding to the Jobs Numbers in Poland (Ohio)

Obama’s response to today’s jobs report amounted to a just a couple of lines; he called it "a step in the right direction," followed by the usual admonition that "we can’t be satisfied." Actually I’m basing that off of Jon Ward’s report at Huffington Post because even though I listened to the whole speech I missed that snippet somehow. And I guess that tells you something: really, his response was the larger act of talking about the economy in front of a supportive crowd in industry-heavy Northeastern Ohio. He was able to reiterate the major contrasts between his economic worldview and Romney. (Just a reminder that the jobs report is released on the first Friday after every month at 8:30 AM, so the White House knew well in advance that this event would constitute his reaction.) What struck me about the speech is that—and this isn’t exactly breaking news—in our daily obsession over trends and messaging, we tend to overlook the basic realities of the electoral college map.

It is going to be enormously hard for Romney to win the presidency without winning Ohio. For the moment, at least, Ohio’s economy is improving, and in the Mahoning Valley, where Obama was just now, the health of the auto industry is a huge deal. So when the president (and the all-American worker who introduced him) told the crowd that things are getting better, and that they’re getting better because of actions Obama took, that likely seems more plausible than it would to an audience in DC. And that’s probably fine. (It’s the same strategy that sent Joe Biden to Waterloo, Iowa last week, where the John Deere-led local economy is booming.)

The other thing to notice, I thought, was that Obama continues to burnish his regular-guy cred while portraying Romney as a Swiss bank-loving titan of outsourcing. This anecdote, with its implicit contrast to Romney’s sprawling lakefront vacation manse—where the governor just happens to be spending the week—is the kind of material that resonates with crowds because it can’t be faked.

"The best vacation I had when I was a kid was when my grandmother, my mom, and my sister, we traveled around the country on Greyhound buses and on trains and at we stayed at Howard Johnsons. I was 11, and so if there was any kind of swimming pool" [laughter] "it didn’t matter how big it was, right? You’d spend the whole day there and then, you know, you were real excited to go to where the vending machine was and the ice machine, and get the ice. And that was like a big deal. And you’d just see the sights and stop by a diner someplace."

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